A Barbershop Quartet Plus A Solo: A Cut Beyond Collection #1

By Rob Vagle

For All Your Head Needs Inside And Out.

 

A Cut Beyond Barbershop always open for business. Everywhere, anytime. Turn your head after visiting and it blinks out of existence.

 

A barbershop full of multitudes.

 

Wherever the shop appears, the barbershop changes. A different name and a different barber—different gender, different nationality, different race.

 

A Cut Beyond Barbershop Quartet includes stories about a woman looking for help facing her fear of death, a young man offered a chance to change a fateful choice in his recent past, and a traveling man realizes he may not be entirely human.

 

The Solo gives you a story by Rob Vagle outside of his A Cut Beyond Barbershop series. Here, "Dispatch From The Other Side," a story about ancient and mysterious technology, about immigration and separation.

 

Five stories in this collection brings you mystery and the fantastic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dog Copilot Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393676133

Rob Vagle

Rob Vagle's short stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Polyphony, Heliotrope, and Strange New Worlds. He lives and writes in Tempe, AZ. He grew up in Minnesota and lived in Eugene, OR. for fifteen years. Stories and novels published by Dog Copilot Press, available wherever ebooks are sold. He drinks coffee.

Book preview

A Barbershop Quartet Plus A Solo

A Barbershop Quartet Plus A Solo

A Cut Beyond Collection #1

Rob Vagle

Dog Copilot Press

Copyright © 2020 by Rob Vagle

All rights reserved.

Dispatch From The Other Side, first published in The Golden Door, 2020, Blackbird Publishing.

Cover Art copyright © by ValleraTo at depositphotos

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

A Cut Beyond Barbershop

1. In The Company Of Death

2. The Price Of Redemption

3. Something Is Missing

4. Two Lonely

The Solo

5. Dispatch From The Other Side

Who Is This Writer-Dude?

Also by Rob Vagle

A Cut Beyond Barbershop

An Introduction

Imagine, if you will, a barbershop that appears and disappears, changing its name and facade, including the barber working inside, blending in with the setting’s time and place. This barbershop is different to each person who sees it and sets foot inside. A place of trick mirrors and altered reality. A place for all your head needs. For each person who sets foot in A Cut Beyond, that person’s world is changed.

I started writing these barbershop stories because of my love for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. A Cut Beyond is a place where I can write idea stories, science fiction, and social commentary. It’s a place that has no boundaries.

Please be careful when you enter here, for even I don’t know whether the barbershop is malevolent or benevolent, but seems to depend on the story being told.

There’s much wonder to be witnessed in here and fascinating stories to unfold.

---

Rob Vagle

Mesa, Arizona

September 2020

1

In The Company Of Death

Outside my shop window I see the specter of death . . .

---

It may be ironic, but Lila Sorenson found when she visited cemeteries her fear of death dissipated. As if upon seeing somebody's final resting place her mind said told you it's no big deal, nothing to be afraid of, you big baby. Simply put, death is a manicured lawn or a marble wall in a mausoleum or a hand polished urn.

However, today of all days, the visit wasn't working.

Lila pulled her coat closed tighter, gripping at the open buttons at the collar. A north wind blew sharp enough to make her eyes water and she squirmed at the chill bolting up her spine. Spread all around her were the graves of the citizens of Queen Of Sorrows Cemetery. The headstones were flat and the grass—not yet yellow in the fall—encroached over the edges. She missed seeing the standing headstones she had seen at other cemeteries. The standing ones seemed like sentries and they gave a cemetery a crowded look. Queen Of Sorrows, on the other hand, seemed lonely.

The leaves were swirling off the trees collecting at her feet and on the paver stone walk. The air smelled like pumpkin and butternut squash and she thought perhaps that more than anything made death less scary.

Yet the chills still throbbed up her spine. There was only one other group of visitors here—a family with a beaten up Subaru Outback far behind her, the sound of bagpipes blasting from the car stereo.

She had chosen to walk in a cemetery because her therapist had, in essence, dumped her two hours earlier.

Her therapist was named Bill—and for some absurd reason he sported a handle-bar mustache—had said to her, Fearing death is natural. Everybody has that fear. Then he peered at her and twirled his mustache expecting a reaction from her.

Lila, apparently, held onto that fear and wouldn't let go. Bill didn't explore the reason why she held onto that fear and when Lila brought that subject up for discussion, Bill rolled his eyes.

They say a good therapist will help you see the flaws in your thought processes and behaviors. Bill thought her fear of death was a feature, not a bug.

Lila had been afraid of death for as long as she could remember. It sat there in the back her mind like a pitch dark room and she never wanted to peer inside. She felt its all consuming darkness.

Bill told her it was perfectly normal.

When her parents died within six months of each other when Lila was still in college, she felt numb. She didn't cry at the funeral, didn't feel guilty about it. Her parents were pieces of work—a mother who was physically and emotionally abusive, and a father who was emotionally distant. It wasn't a good combination, those two.

Bill told her everybody grieves in their own way. Perfectly normal.

Lila couldn't pinpoint the instant the fear of death reared its skeletal head and gripped her ever waking moment. Lila was convinced she was born with it.

Bill, once again, said she was perfectly normal.

Maybe, Lila thought, she needed a clinical psychologist, not a simple therapist.

Lila had taken the day off from the library, so she didn’t need to get back to work. Instead of looking for another shrink she had decided to walk among the dead.

Perfectly normal. And typical for Lila.

But The Queen Of Sorrows Cemetery wasn't cutting it.

As she walked the wide path to the exit, a shadow of a bird moved along the grass and crossed the paver stone path it front of her. She looked up and saw a crow flying in circles. The crow flew against a cloudy sky and began cawing, insistent, as if demanding something.

At the open gate, the traffic along Pioneer Street was loud with the hum of engines and hiss of bus breaks. Lila stopped before leaving the gate and peered up a the cawing crow.

You talking to me? she said.

Upon seeing Lila stopped in her tracks, the crow dove in on her. Lila swore under her breath as she saw the crow make the instant decision to push her all the way out. Harassment is what it was. Lila